Did Moses and the Exodus really exist? I believe that this story was passed down through oral tradition with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but I have an atheist friend who I would like to meet on common secular ground with about this issue. He claims that there is no evidence outside of the Bible which supports the existence of Moses and Exodus. He also claims that there are Egyptian records from the time that Moses would of existed, yet there is no mention of Moses, Hebrew slaves, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the leaving of the Hebrew people.
I am not a biblical scholar by any means, but there have been lots of the things in Exodus that people seem to have discovered to be historically accurate, though usually they attribute them to natural causes.
The Nile really does sometimes have a series of events in which it turns red from algal bloom, which kills the fish, drives the frogs out onto the land, poisons animals, causes immense numbers of flies from all the dead creatures, and boils from the bites of flies…all of which are part of the Exodus story. It appears that at about that time there was a severe famine in Egypt which would have driven people to eat contaminated food. About that there is no doubt at all, since ancient flood records and sediments clearly show there was a terrible drought then, and some records do speak of a famine. Since in Egyptian society, the first born was considered the most important child, the first born child would have gotten more of the contamination, and there could have easily been a massive dying-off of the first born. It appears that at about the time of the Exodus, the volcano Thera erupted, which would have appeared in Egypt as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. It was such a violent eruption, with severe aftershocks, that an earthquake caused by it could have easily caused a recession of water, then a tidal wave, in the Red Sea.
On the other hand, it is sometimes thought the true translation of “Red Sea” should be “Reed Sea”, a fairly shallow body of water that sometimes blows dry in parts when there are strong desert winds, then returns when the winds die down.
There are actual carvings of Hebrews on ancient buildings of about that era, depicted as a conquered or subjugated, but sometimes as an aggressive people. The word “Hebrew”, (“Habiru” actually) is written in heieroglyphs on monuments in Egypt.
It is very clear that a numerous and foreign people had settled in the land of Goshen around the right time, but then disappeared from there. Nobody knows why they did, but the ruins in the area have been fairly recently discovered and partially excavated. Whoever they were, their artifacts establish that they weren’t Egyptians.
Rameses II is generally thought to have been the Pharoah of the Exodus. Not he, but his son appears to have met a violent death. It is thought that his death motivated Rameses to build the enormous complex of Rameseid tombs.
One might believe God visited the plagues of Egypt and caused all the things in Exodus directly by non-natural miracle or through natural events. But no matter what, one cannot truly say none of those things happened at all, because some of them could easily have happened, and some pretty much undeniably did.
Non-mention of the name of Moses isn’t at all odd. The Egyptians had a practice of not putting the names of their enemies on things because they thought it had some role in their immortality. In some instances, as with Queen Hatshepsut, they actually went and carved her name off all kinds of monuments she built during her reign, because she was hated by the subsequent ruler and his followers, and they wanted to deprive her of an afterlife.
